This race I had my A game going coupled with just beautiful evening overcast light. My Nikon D700 and Nikon 70-200 VRII didn’t disappoint either. Without a doubt the D700’s auto focus is way better than my D7000. Even if I mount my 70-200 on my D7000, its just not nearly as good. I think thats the main reason people love their D300’s so much – the D300s have the same auto-focus system as the D700. I’m so happy with my D700, my D7000 (Dx) is getting relegated to backup duty.

D700 1/640th f5 iso2800 200mm Nikon 70-200vrII

When the shot counts the skill and equipment made a huge difference. Above is Abiyot Warku who won with an astonishing 14:07 and a 4:33 pace. The finish line was overcrowded as you would expect for a race with 5000+ participants. I had Abiyot in frame for exactly 3 frames and two of those frames people were in the way. The little white speckles you see in the frame are rain drops.

D700 1/800th f5.6 iso2000 70mm Nikon 70-200vrII

There were plenty of photographers, but no one was actually trying to cover every runner as that would require a team -it was everyone for themselves.

D700 1/640th f5 iso2000 130mm Nikon 70-200vrII

One of the cool things about going out with my 10 year old son was that he was able to call out shots in advance for things that he wanted me to get. He just loved this!

D700 1/640th f4 iso1250 145mm Nikon 70-200vrII

Another thing noticeable in these shots is that I worked on panning and tracking a particular runner. I wasn’t panning to create motion blur, but instead to get better shots.

How I set my Nikon D700 for this race:

Manual Mode

Aperture around 5.6

Shutter around 800

I let the camera handle exposure by letting the ISO float making sure that I didn’t bottom out below 200 and that I didn’t exceed about 3200. If I saw that ISO hitting anywhere near ISO 200 I would have upped the shutter speed. If I saw myself up in the ISO 3200 range I would have lowered shutter speed and opened up the aperture a little more.

VR = OFF. There doesn’t seem to be any definitive information about this, but the general consensus is above 1/500th and VR can actually make things worse.

I used a single focus point in continuous focus mode. AF-C priority selection = Release+Focus.